Easy Ways to Speed up a WordPress Site

First things first, what exactly does site speed mean for your WordPress website? Let us take a look at some stats before exploring the response to this question! Estimates from studies conducted from 2000 to 2016 have indicated that the average attention span of humans has reduced to 7 seconds from 12 seconds.

This clearly shows that website owners have very little time to show their content to users. If your website is slow, then users are most likely to leave the website before it loads completely. Not the results you want from your investments in a Dallas web design company, do you? 

Furthermore, case studies on major sites such as Google and Amazon have revealed that the delay of one second in loading a website could lead to a reduction of customer satisfaction by 16% and page views by 11%. In addition to this, companies can lose conversions by a margin of 7%. These seem like substantial reasons to consult with your Dallas web design company on ways to improve the speed of your WordPress website!

Even if these statistics do not make you realize the importance of speed of WordPress websites, then you should note that websites with faster loading times are ranked higher by search engines such as Google. That is a sufficient enough reason to focus on improving the speed of your WordPress website, isn’t it?

Reasons for a slower WordPress website

You contact a Dallas web design company, fix an amazing design for your WordPress website and follow all precautions to have higher loading speed of the site. Despite all these measures, you fail to have a faster website! What could be the possible reasons? Let us think of the problems that reduce the speed of a WordPress website to find easy ways to speed up a WordPress site. Here are some of the key problems leading to a slow WordPress website:

·       Poorly coded plugins can be highly responsible for slower websites.

·       The lack of proper configuration of the web hosting server also affects the speed of your website.

·       External scripts including font loaders and ads can reduce website performance to a large extent.

·       The inability of WordPress site to serve cached pages could also result in slowing down the website due to overloading of server. In some cases, your website could also crash as a result of this!

Convenient ways to increase WordPress site speed

Looking at the concerns mentioned above that reduce the speed of your WordPress site, it would be reasonable to move towards the methods that can be applied for increasing speed of a WordPress site. The following approaches are easy to implement, and you should consult with a Dallas web design company for the best WordPress site design.

Selection of hosting provider

The foremost blunder that a Dallas web design company could make in designing your WordPress website is in the choice of hosting service provider. You have to make sure that the web design company invests in a quality hosting service. Going for a shared hosting plan can seem to be easy on the wallet now, but it would hurt in the long term as your WordPress website slows down.

Therefore, it is recommended to opt for VPS (Virtual Private Server) or managed WordPress hosting. With VPS hosting, you can get the right mix of speed, cost, and convenience while managed WordPress hosting allows running your website on a server optimized particularly for WordPress websites.

Keep the website updated

Always ask your chosen Dallas web design company for using the updated versions of WordPress and related components. The new updates of WordPress are as important as the new versions of the software on your server. The new bug fixes and features with each new version can help in addressing any vulnerability with the themes and plugins on your WordPress website. This can be a saving grace from bad plugins that can reduce the speed of your WordPress site. Most important of all, updated versions of your WordPress website would be safe from any security threats. That’s an additional advantage, isn’t it?

Optimize images on your site

Another significant factor that plays a huge role in determining website speed is the optimization of images. It is a known fact that images take up bulk space on a WordPress website page. Therefore, you can ask the Dallas web design company for optimizing the images on your website by compressing them without compromising on image quality.

Implement content delivery networks (CDNs)

Using a content delivery network (CDN) can also be a feasible approach to increase the speed of your WordPress site. You can consult with a Dallas web design company of your choice to find out the large scale use of CDNs by many famous blogs. The basic application of CDN is observed in a collection of all static files on your WordPress site such as images, CSS, JavaScript, etc. and serving them on servers closer to users for fast downloading. Quite an easy way to improvise user experience, isn’t it?    

Homepage optimization

Finally, you should focus on the optimization of your WordPress site homepage because it is the first page that users see on your site. So, faster the homepage loads, faster is your website! Some proven methods that you can try for improving the speed of WordPress website include removal of inactive plugins and widgets, displaying highlights rather than full posts and decreasing the number of posts on a particular page. Therefore, minimal design for the homepage could bring you lots of benefits for improving the speed of your WordPress website.

On a concluding note, you should always note that a faster loading WordPress website provides a better user experience for visitors. In the long run, a faster website could also help in securing better ranks on search engine results, and this is a reward you don’t want to miss on, do you?